During college I thought that Coral Gables’ zoning restrictions were ridiculous. I thought homeowners should have the right to construct or style their homes however they want. But then I moved to Minneapolis and got exposed to far too many hideous home modifications and style inconsistencies.
Here’s a mild example:
The law school warns us that lawyers and law students are more susceptible to alcoholism than the general population. And yet…
Last night Matt, Judd, and I celebrated our team’s Trivia win at the Lowertown Bulldog. We are walking back to my car when I announce my plans to drop out of law school:
Last week I decided to stop wasting my time.
I quit a clerkship, dropped a pair of toxic “friends” and told the boyfriend that I not getting any younger, these ankles are swelling, and it is time to finalize our adoption and mortgage plans…
Well, maybe not that last part, (That is for this week!) but I have realized that this blog is one of the things that is wasting my time.
This blog is supposed to be a journal and a time saver. It is neither.
I’m at SuperAmerica and pass an overly-tan girl and her pale friend. Overly-tan girl stares me down and when I pass her I hear her whisper to Casper:
Overly-tan girl: “Hah! And people call me orange!”
I’m furious.
Remember last month’s epic Sprint customer service fail when it took me three hours to purchase my Blackberry?
Well, this morning Madre Jansen sent me an email:
Madre Jansen: “What is this $30 equipment charge on the phone bill? Here is the username and password for the account. Figure it out.”
So I call sprint:
Sprint Rep: “Hi stranger. What’s the 10-digit pin for the account?”
Me: “Erm… I have a password and username.”
Sprint Rep: “Credentials fail. That’s only for online.”
So I hang up, call mom for the pin, and call Sprint again:
Me: “Here is the pin…”
Sprint Rep #2: “Great. Did you call us recently?”
Me: “Yeah, like two minutes ago. I had to get the pin from a parent.”
Sprint Rep: “Okay Shady. So, because you just called I have to have my manager listening in and….”
Me: “Okay. I have a $30 ‘equipment charge’ on my bill, and I would like to know what it is for.”
Sprint Rep: “Yes. You do have an equipment charge. It’s for equipment!”
Me: “…how helpful. But what does that mean? What is the charge for? What equipment?”
Sprint Rep: “I dunno. You bought something at a store. I just have a sku number. It’s a mystery!”
Me: “…well, would the store know?”
Sprint Rep: “Hm. Maybe. Where is the store? What’s your zip? Let me call them. Hold. […] They said you bought a Blackberry and a charger. It might have been for a charger!”
Me: “Hm. I bought a car charger, but I guarantee it wasn’t a flat $30… and I paid for it with a credit card.”
Sprint Rep: “We are only showing one charge on your mastercard.”
Me: “I don’t think I put it on my mastercard. That was just for the blackberry. Hm.”
Sprint Rep: “Check your bank statements. I dunno…”
Me: “I think the Sprint rep was going to give me a $30 credit for it taking three hours to buy my phone.”
Sprint Rep: “Hm maybe. Call us back when you figure that out. Peace!”
I pull up my bank statements online. The car charger was on my Visa. The blackberry was on the mastercard. Sprint was full of crap, and the $30 charge was still a mystery.
I call Sprint back.
Sprint Rep #3: “Yes, we see that you have a $30 charge. Let me look into that. Hold.”
Me: “… ”
Sprint Rep: Yes. It looks like your blackberry was $291.51 and you only paid $261.51 with your mastercard. That’s why your account was charged.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure the $30 was the “pain in the ass/incompetence” credit the store rep. offered me for waiting 3 hours at the store.”
Sprint Rep: “Oh, well let me contact that store. Hold. […] it seems like Hank, the rep that helped you, is not in today. The store will call me back tomorrow and I’ll follow up with you and we’ll get this resolved.”
Me: “We have to wait for him to go into work?”
Sprint Rep: “Yes.”
Me: “This is frustrating. The point of the $30 credit was to compensate me for his bad customer service that caused me to be in the store for 3 hours and now I’ve wasted 30 minutes dealing with this.”
Sprint Rep: “Sorry that you’ve spent thirteen minutes on the phone. I’m going above and beyond here because normally you would have to deal with the store.”
Me: “Oh, I’d love to give them a piece of my mind. And I’ve only been on the phone with you for 13 minutes but you’re the third person I’ve talked to today. I’m taking this pain in the ass in aggregate. I just feel further inconvenienced by the store’s incompetence and I’m frustrated that I have to wait to get this resolved. Whine-bitch-moan, boom-shaka-laka, laka boom.”
I was seething by the end of the call, and then called Madre Jansen:
Mom: “So grasshopper, how’d it go?”
Me: “BAH!! Next time I need something from a Sprint store, I’m going to Wisconsin.”
Note: the conversation is obviously condensed and paraphrased. The point is, that I’m only a Sprint customer because of my parent’s longstanding relationship to the company…otherwise I’d already be with AT&T.
On Thursday I had a review session for Real Estate law, and needed to print notes. I went to the law school library to print, and I was shocked by the wave of irritation that came over me.
The psst, psst, whispers. Girl on phone. Whooping cough boy…
I was not there to study – I just wanted to print – but within 5 minutes I was tense, twitchy, and annoyed.
I can study in cafes, undergrad libraries, public libraries, and at home with a 100lb dog sleeping on me, but somehow the law school library irritates the hell out of me.
I think it is the reminder of all the annoying people I spent the past semester with. Irrelevant question boy, petty gossip girl, Mr. mouth-odor, Mrs. body-odor, Facebook Scrabble boy, streaming-video-in-class girl… the smug skunk…
The little house of horrors was all here, and I needed to get out, immediately. You can find me at Dunn Brothers, or maybe Wilde Roast…
I don’t understand the point of these University of Minnesota crime alerts. The theme seems to be: “Young-ish black men wearing dark clothes mugged someone. Watchout.”
I’m sure the police are frustrated when the only description they get is “I dunno. It was a black dude. Youngish… dark clothes.” – but passing that unhelpful description on to the student body probably sends one message: “If you see a young black male: be very afraid!”
This is why I rock pink.
Here’s today’s crime alert:
On Thursday, November 19 at approximately 6:30 p.m., a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student was the victim of an armed robbery near Marcy Park, off campus in the Dinkytown neighborhood.
The victim was at the intersection of 7th Street SE and 11th Avenue SE when he was approached by two males. One of the suspects pointed a silver handgun at the victim and ordered him to the ground. While the victim was on the ground, the suspects took his backpack and ran south-bound from 7th Avenue SE in between 10th and 11th Avenue SE. The victim was not injured.
The first suspect is described as a black male between 20 and 30 years of age, approximately six feet, two inches tall with a medium build. The suspect was wearing a baggy black hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and black baggy jeans. The suspect held the sliver handgun in his left hand.
The second suspect is described as a black male between 20 and 30 years of age, approximately five feet, eight inches tall with a medium build. The suspect wore glasses and had short black curly hair, and was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and dark pants.
Next time I consider writing a race-based post I am just going to look for Supreme Court opinions on point.
From today’s Conlaw reading:
Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 241 (U.S. 1995)
(STEVENS, J., dissenting). It is also true that “remedial” racial preferences may reflect “a desire to foster equality in society,” But there can be no doubt that racial paternalism and its unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination.
So-called “benign” discrimination teaches many that because of chronic and apparently immutable handicaps, minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence.
Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the government’s use of race. These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are “entitled” to preferences.
And,
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 349 (U.S. 2003)
(SCALIA) Still other suits may challenge the bona fides of the institution’s expressed commitment to the educational benefits of diversity that immunize the discriminatory scheme in Grutter. (Tempting targets, one would suppose, will be those universities that talk the talk of multiculturalism and racial diversity in the courts but walk the walk of tribalism and racial segregation on their campuses–through minority-only student organizations, separate minority housing opportunities, separate minority student centers, even separate minority-only graduation ceremonies.)
The university described in Scalia’s parenthetical reminds me a lot of the University of Miami, where there was a beast known as “minority life” which consisted of minority fraternal organizations, clubs, events, and a de facto minority dorm.
That was the backdrop for the 0L summer “I am not Tyrone” tirade post.
That was also why I didn’t apply to the minority Big Law summer internship program, which had a prompt akin to “Tell us your victimization story.”
Anyhoot. Back to Conlaw… this week is officially crunch time…
I have two twitter account.
My @dennisjansen account is for friends, news feeds, and celebrities that I follow closely. It also updates my facebook status, so my tweets are less frequent.
I update my @dennisjansen more frequently, add people more freely, and use the account to interact without cluttering up my friend’s facebook feeds.
I’ve taken the approach of adding everyone who adds me on @dennisjansen, and this is a mistake, because not all twitter-friends are created equal.
Here is an example of the types of tweets I see through @dennisjansen:
These are the types of tweets that I see on @dennisjansen:
Needless to say, I have to wade through a lot of crap on the @dennisjansen account.
The point of the @dennisjansen account is not the amount of followers, but the ability to interact/network with more people. All off these marketing, news-aggregating, all around crappy twitterers are cluttering my feed, and some weeding is in order.
I’m going on an unadd campaign!
See also:
These people are not worth interacting with or following.
Note: I understand people are busy, so here are some cliffnotes for the rant:
Today’s reading assignment for Employment law involved Title VII workplace discrimination claims.
I was reminded of the “I am not Tyrone” post that I wrote during the law school admissions process when I was worried about law schools balking at my lack of stereotypical African-American “blackness” because that was exactly what some schools were recruiting me for.
After the first day of orientation, my housemates pointed out that I was the only black person in our year.1 This was a recurring conversation during my 1L year, and I was amused that the lack of “diversity” bothered2 white students more than it did me.
This year the law school gave fee vouchers to black applicants and (surprise, surprise) we have more black students.
Several of our 50-some-odd transfers are also black. Of course the Black Law Students Association is thrilled, but I think the black students serve a dual purpose by giving the white students a piece of mind.3
Congratulations. You can feel like you go to a “diverse” school now.
Out of the seven 1Ls at the BLSA meeting, I think only one of them wasn’t mixed (ie, half/white or Asian) but Americans who want diversity for diversity’s sake care primarily about appearance of African-American ancestry.4
The most obvious example of this is our president, and the reaction of the African-American community to his election.
No one stopped to ask whether the son of white woman and an African immigrant bore anything more than a superficial relation to the African-American community.4 Obama is not the progeny of the people who have been oppressed in this country for 400 years any more than Bobby Jindal is.
And what about an Indian candidate? Would Jessie Jackson be as excited to see Bobby Jindal win the presidency? What if Jindal was married to a black woman? Would we have Jindal T-shirts at Urban Outfitters then?
The answer is no.
The civil rights movement opened the door for Jindal just as it did for people of every race and sex, but we would not have the same homecoming celebration for anyone that did not “appear” African-American because the focus on diversity is as superficial as the discriminatory practices it aims to counter.
Anyhoot, before I start parroting Michelle Malkin, let me just get to the holding5 of the post:
A diversity initiative is bigoted and backward if it simply seeks people of a particular skin color irrespective of whether that person truly represents the historically oppressed group that the diversity initiative is trying to promote.
If a Haitian-American student is eligible for the “black scholarship” then why not an Asian American? The only difference is that we didn’t historically oppress as many people that look like the Asian as much as we did people who look like the Haitian. Why should the Haitian benefit from this?
Sure, we aren’t going to inquire about a black person’s background to determine whether they are African American like we ask for tribal affiliation of a Native American. So why bother?
What is the point of recruiting black students, or persons of any minority status at all? Under the current system the half-black student raised in a white household gets a fee voucher and a tour, but the Persian or Korean applicant is ignored.
And I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate the diversity of my school., because I think it’s fascinating.
But to me the diversity includes the ignored minorities (the Persians, Koreans, Chinese), the variety6 of black students, and even the white students who come from different parts of the country and have different education/vocational backgrounds.
And I think it is sad that this diversity is lost on the students and administrators who are only looking for more brown faces.7
1 There are two others, but they were not as readily identifiable.
2 It annoys me that people refer to the lack of one minority group (blacks) as “a lack of diversity.” Nevermind the East-Asians, Indians, Hispanics, and Native Americans we have in our year – everyone wants to see Tyrone.
3 Not to say that being half-black somehow makes one “not black” but what I’m harping on is the assumption that all black people share the same African-American background, which is the only assumption that can justify the focus on the community. Do people really care about the Ethiopian or Somali students? If so, why are these people not equally thrilled by the amount of East-Indians and Koreans at our school?
4 Community organizing and marrying an African-Woman helps. I’m not saying that he’s not special for his own reasons, but the phrase “the first black president” implies “the first African-American president” rather than “the first Kenyan-American president.”
5 If blog posting interrupts my legal research I can use “Holding.”
6 Somali, Caribbean, black-white, black-filipino, black-Cuban…Africans…etc. Really this is a forest/for the trees statement. The “black” community is more diverse than your average person cares about.
7 These are the same people that don’t realize that Hispanics in Miami look more like Gloria, Enrique, and Pitbull than Carlos Mencia.
The vice president of the University of Minnesota just sent out an email:
Yesterday, the University of Minnesota Police Department issued a Public Safety Alert regarding a shooting that occurred just off campus. This Public Safety Alert was the fourth issued in just over a week, and it’s unfortunate that this spate of crimes has occurred as students are returning to campus and the University community is preparing for the 2009-10 academic year.
The alerts are sent out because the University of Minnesota is committed to the safety of our students, faculty, and staff, and in compliance with the federal Clery Act.
Alerts are not intended to alarm or frighten anyone.
Really? Let’s see, here are some gems from the University of Minnesota’s public safety department:
We all know that guy or girl. Over at The Shark I have a post addressing annoying social networkers. I included 5 easy ways to avoid joining the irritating crowd. The post is here.
I was in high school when I watched Supersize Me. At the time, I ate at McDonalds twice a day, every day. The movie didn’t phase me, and my drive-thru habits continued. 1
After reading Jillian Michael’s “Master your Metabolism” my grocery list turned into that of a hippie yoga teacher, but drive-thrus were still the norm when I didn’t make time to stop at the grocery store.
My eating habits consisted of fruits, vegetables, and fresh meat mixed with fast food and vending machine “food.”
I realized that my eating habits reached the disgusting level last week during my summer school final exams. I felt queasy and sleep deprived, and my stack of bluebooks was surrounded by cups of vending machine coffee2, two bags of pretzels, a bag of generic vending machine salted trail mix, and a box of Mike & Ikes. Sure, I had healthy food at home, but this crap was somehow in front of me.
Sometime between my Professional Responsibility exam and my Wills & Trust exam I decided this had to stop.
That day I decided to ditch the vending machine food and the late night fast food trips.
On Saturday, Jill and I were pulling a marathon work day, and we decided to take a break and fetch lunch. I decided to shake up the new “healthy” diet with a strategically timed trip to Culver’s.3 I figured that a burger wouldn’t shake things up too much…
…and I was wrong.
We get back to work, I eat the burger, and twenty minutes later we hear a loud cranking and gurgling sound.
Jill: “Oh my god, is that your stomach!?”
I give her a pathetic, panicked look and flee to the restroom.
Culver’s was officially axed from the diet.
Today, I axed all the other fast food restaurants. I saw the movie “Food Inc.” and I think it finished the diet change that Jillian Michaels started.
Jillian described how disgusting most food is, but it is one thing to read about how gross food is, and it’s another thing to see it.
The reason why Supersize Me didn’t change my eating habits is because I lost weight on my straight-McDonald’s diet. Supersize Me didn’t disgust me because I knew that fast food was made from poorly treated, hormone pumped animals and chemically engineered potatoes. So what?
Food Inc. answered the “So what?” question.
The mass archive import brought on a little nostalgic tinge.
We are covering mental insanity in Crimlaw today.
In today’s case1 the defendant stabbed his wife in the back because she did not support his (and god’s) plan for a sports facility:
Serravo (the defendant) gave the doctor a history of having worked on a plan, inspired by his relationship to God, to establish a multi-million dollar sports complex called Purely Professionals.
This facility, according to Serravo, would enable him to achieve his goal of teaching people the path to perfection. On the night of the stabbing, Serravo, according to the history given to Doctor Seig, was excited because he finally believed that he had received some positive encouragement in his endeavor from some King Soopers union members, but he was discouraged by some inner “evil spirits” who kept raising troublesome questions about how he would deal with his wife’s lack of encouragement and support.
…the court of appeals determined that, although there was some evidence indicating that Serravo knew the stabbing of his wife was illegal and contrary to societal standards of morality, there was evidentiary support for the insanity verdict because there was expert testimony that Serravo was inspired by an insane delusion that God had decreed the act.
More of the case after the jump:
Don’t write bitchy tweets. They will be used against you.
I learned this the hard way in undergrad, when I worked at the front desk of a dormitory over summer break. The dormitory housed a summer scholar camp.
The campers were obnoxious, poorly supervised high school students. The camp counselors were college students.
On this particular day, the campers are seated near the front desk and paying “never have I ever” which is one of those games that quickly goes to the gutter. Within 10 minutes the high school students are screaming about bestiality and orgies.
I am not amused, so I write a bitchy tweet and then return to my book. The tweet was something like, “About to send these vulgar kids out into the rain!”
The tweet updates my facebook status. I think nothing of it.
I think this is brilliant.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Email from my boss…
Hecht = My dorm
SA = Security assistants
Hey everyone,
I just wanted to make you aware that there may be an increased security presence in Hecht for the next couple of weeks.
Due to some extreme behavior by residents that is creating a potentially dangerous environment for other students and one not conducive to sleep and study SA’s will be spending some extra time in the elevator lobbies on certain floors.
If you see them just say hello! If you feel that your floor may also need this increased presence let me know.
We have limited staff to work with but will do what we can. If you have any questions or concerns let me know.
– Bosslady
What the hell, Miami?
She asked me to be specific, and she asked me to write in great detail.